Platform Support

The same image will run on BeagleBone White and Black.
BeagleBone White tested with and without Beagleboardtoys DVI CAPE.

Booting from a uSD card

To boot from a uSD card make sure the card is properly prepared and formatted.
Directly formatting the card from a Windows based PC is not enough as the card's boot partition will not be marked as "active", which is required for the AM335x processor to recognize the card. The best way to format is to use the HP USB based
reader format tool (included in the tools directory) or use the TI format tool.

Using HP format tool

Insert the uSD card into a USB reader and plug in the PC. Execute the \DriveKey\HPUSBFW.exe program.
Select the correct drive and format. When complete, copy the MLO file (by itself) from the image folder to the root drive of the uSD card. Only after the MLO file is copied, copy the ebootsd.bin and NK.BIn file to the card. It is important the MLO file is copied
by itself first as the MLO file must be the first entry in the FAT table of the card for proper booting.
Insert the card into the BeagleBone and power up.

For BeagleBone Black insert card, press the user button and power up. Pressing the user button on power up will force a boot from the uSD card instead of the default eMMC device onboard. You can boot the CE image this way and still keep the factory Linux image
in eMMC.

Booting from eMMC

The exact same image files can be used to boot from eMMC if desired.

Note: Backup any of your Linux files/image files if needed although its a rather simple procedure to reflash the entire Linux image.

It is possible to repartition and format the eMMC under CE but this can be rather painful. I found the easiest way to proceed is leverage the existing Linux setup. To boot from the eMMC first prepare and boot from a uSD card as described above. Once booted,
open the "BOOT" folder, this is the Linux "BEAGEBONE" partition. This partition is already formatted FAT32 and can be left as is. You can delete all the Linux files in this folder. Copy the MLO file from the "Storage Card" folder
to the "BOOT" folder, after this file is copied proceed to copy the ebootsd.bin and NK.bin files also.
Remove the uSD card and reboot. Next, if CE starts go to Control Panel->Storage Manager.
Select the DSKx: eMMC Disk. You should see two partitions listed: BEAGLEBONE and Part00.
Part00 is the Linux ext3 formatted partition and CE will not recognize it. With Storage manager you can delete Part00 and recreate it as a FAT32 or exFAT partition that CE can use as extra storage. Be sure to name the partition "Part00" as before.
After completing the above steps, reboot. With Windows Explorer you should see two disk type folders, BOOT and Hard Disk. BOOT is the smaller image file partition, it contains the boot files, image file and the persistent registry files. The Hard Disk folder
is the large bulk data folder you can store your application data files in.